Making Work Life Easier: How PayrollHero Helps Different Businesses with All-in-One Features

If you’re tired of juggling a bunch of tools to manage your team, PayrollHero might just be your new best friend. This all-in-one platform covers everything from timekeeping and scheduling to attendance, HR stuff, payroll, and even leave management. Let’s see how it can make life easier for different types of businesses:

  • Retail Shops:
    • Keep track of everyone’s hours easily, especially with different shifts.
    • Make sure you’ve got the right number of staff during busy times.
    • No more attendance headaches – it’s all sorted.
  • Hotels and Restaurants:
    • Handle those crazy schedules in the hospitality biz.
    • Keep tabs on who’s there when they should be.
    • Payroll and leave management that just makes sense for your industry.
  • Factories and Manufacturers:
    • Keep production running smoothly with accurate timekeeping.
    • Manage your workforce without breaking a sweat.
    • Easy peasy payroll and leave management for your hardworking team.
  • Healthcare Heroes:
    • Make sure you’ve got enough staff on hand when it matters most.
    • Stay compliant with all those healthcare rules.
    • Payroll and leave? Covered. So you can focus on taking care of others.
  • Tech Wizards:
    • Flexibility for your flexible workforce, including remote work.
    • All the HR info you need for your tech-savvy team.
    • Payroll and leave management that fits your agile style.
  • Schools and Colleges:
    • Keep track of who’s in class or on duty.
    • Organize classes and events without the headache.
    • Payroll and leave management that lets you focus on education, not paperwork.

No more piecing together different tools for every little thing. PayrollHero wraps it all up in one neat package, making work life simpler and more organized for everyone. So, whatever your business, give PayrollHero a spin and see how it can make your day-to-day a whole lot smoother!

Wanna see how PayrollHero works? Book a PayrollHero Demo!

Also, check us out on Facebook – https://www.facebook.com/PayrollHero/

HustleShare Podcast

PayrollHero is proud to sponsor Ronster Baetiong’s new podcast –hustleshare.com.

“The podcast that features the daily grind of unique business owners and professionals to show not our differences but to show that most of us are very much alike. Hustleshare was made to showcase the triumphs and challenges people go through in their unique professions and learn how we can apply them to our own daily hustles.”

Understanding Thirteenth Month

Thirteenth Month is a mandatory benefit that all employers in the Philippines need to provide to their rank and file employees who have been employed at their company for longer than one month. I put rank and file in bold as it’s fairly common practice to pay it to all employees, but that’s not mandated by the government. However, it has become traditional for employers to pay the benefit to all employees.

The Labor Code in the Philippines stipulates two distinct employee types. Managerial or Rank and File. The DOLE handbook says:

The Labor Code, as amended, distinguishes a rank-and-file employee from a managerial employee. A managerial employee is one who is vested with powers or prerogatives to lay down and execute management policies and/or to hire, transfer, suspend, layoff, recall, discharge, assign, or discipline employees, or to effectively recommend such managerial actions. All employees not falling within this definition are considered rank-and-file employees.

The above distinction shall be used as guide for the purpose of determining who are rank-and-file employees entitled to the thirteenth month pay.

It’s a pretty easy definition to digest. Anyone who makes managerial decisions or has the managerial powers described would be considered a managerial employee. Anyone who doesn’t is rank and file.

There’s three components to thirteenth month you should be aware of.

  1. How much to pay
  2. When to pay it out.
  3. Over what period to calculate

In this article I’ll explain a bit about all three, and some ways you could consider approaching your thirteenth month calculations.

How much you should pay
The name does hint at what you should be paying. Your thirteenth month pay is roughly equivalent to your normal monthly take home. However, it’s not exactly the same. It’s also important to be careful if just paying out one month is your current formula. There is one scenario where this would mean you’re not compliant with the rules of 13th month, I’ll go into this below.

It’s also important to remember that the DOLE formula is the minimum amount you can pay. If you have a formula that pays your employees more than this, great! Looking after your employees is awesome, and having better benefits differentiates your company from others. This should ultimately help you attract the best talent.

The DOLE Formula

DOLE states that thirteenth month pay shall not be less than 1/12 of the total basic salary earned by an employee in a calendar year. Which is as simple as it sounds as long as you know what constitutes basic salary.

Basic salary is not base pay. Base pay is the monthly, hourly or salary rate that you detail in an employee’s employment terms. If you are not familiar with these terms, please read about the four components of payroll. It’s important to know what base pay is. Although they are not the same, it will be a key component of your calculation.

Let’s say you have a monthly paid employee who is contracted to earn 20,000 pesos a month. They work for your company for the entire year. That means their base pay for the year was 240,000 pesos. Even if your employee was absent during the course of the year, their base pay is still 240,000 pesos.

However, basic salary does adjust based on what you actually paid the employee. If the employee was absent one month, and you only paid them 15,000 that month their basic salary would be 235,000. You also would not include the following:

  • Benefits
  • Vacation Leave and Sick Leave paid out (these are a benefit)
  • Allowances (including COLA)
  • All Multipliers including overtime, night differential, holiday pay etc.

There is a caveat for this though. If you do include these as part of your basic salary through any agreements or company policies you should be including these in your 13th month calculations.

The Steps

  1. Figure out the basic salary for each month.
    Base pay for the month – any absences or base pay deductions = basic salary
  2. Repeat for each month
  3. Add all of the basic salaries for each month together
  4. Divide the total amount by 12

The Gross Pay Formula

As mentioned above, as long as you pay your employees the DOLE minimum you will be covered from a compliance angle. However, there are better formulas you can use for both your payroll process and your employees. The gross pay formula is probably the easiest and fairest.

Gross pay is your base pay + any additional multiplier pay – absences and any other base pay deductions. Why this is so easy is because you already calculate this every payroll. Why this is good for your employees, is that although you are deducting their absences you’d also be giving them a portion of any multiplier pay as well.

The Steps

  1. Add all of the gross pays for the year together
  2. Divide the total amount

The Base Pay Formula

If you read my post about understanding benefits and allowances you will know that I believe simplicity in your payroll processes and policies is crucial to an streamlined payroll process. So the base pay formula is my personal favourite.

As you are not deducting any absences or base pay deductions you’ll be paying better than the DOLE minimum. It’s simple because there is only one step to this calculation.

The Steps

  1. Divide the contract value of the employee’s base pay by 12.

Employee’s Most Recent Salary

I mentioned this briefly before, but some companies do just pay an additional one month’s salary to their employees. This is usually completely fine, and generally won’t cause you any problems.

If the employee earned the same amount of money each month during the year this is exactly the same as the Base Pay Formula mentioned above. If your employee received a promotion, and you pay them their most recent month’s salary you’ll be paying them more than a 1/12 of their year’s base pay.

The only time you need to be careful is if you were to give an employee a demotion or reduce their salary. Let’s say you’re employee earned 20,000 a year but in November you reduced their salary to 15,000. You then paid them 15,000 as their thirteenth month.

If that employee earned 20,000 for 11 months their base pay is at least 220,000 pesos for the year. If you divide that by 12 it would equal 18,333.33. Which means you will have underpaid your employee for their 13th month and not be compliant with what’s mandated by DOLE.

Other than that this is a perfectly acceptable way to calculate your 13th month.

The Steps

  1. Pay your employee an additional month’s pay

 

Manually calculating or using excel
If you are not using an automated payroll system like PayrollHero and use, or intend to use, one of the calculations above that require you to calculate or the track a monthly amount. I would advise doing this calculation each month. It will save you a ton of time in the long run.

If you use excel, you will probably want a separate spreadsheet or sheet to track these amounts in. It doesn’t need to be complicated, just a simple tracker like the one below

If you intend to use multiple spreadsheets, check out the =importrange formula. You could have the 13th month amounts on your main payroll calculator spreadsheet for each month, and use this formula to make them appear in your 13th month tracker.

When to pay 13th Month
When to pay dictates the period you should be calculating for. This is why we need to clarify this point first. The DOLE handbook is explicitly clear about when you need to pay it out.

“The thirteenth-month pay shall be paid not later than December 24 of every year. “

Example, if your pay period is the 1st – 15th, 16th – 31st and you pay out 15 days after the pay period ends. You would need to pay this out no later than the 16 – 30 November payroll.

Why? Because the payout date for 1 – 15 of December would be the 30th of December, which is 6 days past the deadline.

So be careful, it’s not the pay period that matters here but when your employee receives the money that’s important.

You are also allowed to pay out the 13th month twice a year. Instead of paying the value of 12 months in December you could pay the value of 6 months twice.

What period should be used for calculating?
This is probably the part that causes most companies problems. You’re supposed to pay 13th month for the previous year, and the DOLE handbook does use the term calendar year when describing the 13th month.

But how can you pay 13th month accurately for the calendar year if the year isn’t even finished? Remember we have to pay it out on the 24th of December, which in a best case scenario is at least one payroll before the end of the year. You can’t, it’s not possible.

But, most companies do pay 13th month based on the calendar year of the current year. So what this means is they guess the last part of the year. You should not guess when it comes to payroll.

So what do we do instead? We need to pay for the calendar year and it has to be out before the 24th of December. Don’t worry, the important part here is that the DOLE handbook actually says a calendar year.

So let’s say your pay period is 1st – 15th and 16th to 31st. You pay out your payroll on 7 days after the pay period ends. In this scenario you could pay out your 13th month on the 1st to 15th of December payroll as it would be received by your employees on the 22nd of December.

If this was the case, the calendar year you should be using is 16 December of the previous year to 15 December of the current year. This means you will never be guessing with your 13th month pay out.

Maybe your dates are different than the ones I mentioned above. To figure out the period you should use just apply the following:

The day after the end of the pay period you payout of the previous year to the last day of the pay period you pay out of the current year.

Separated and Resigned Employees
It is quite shocking how many employers aren’t aware that they are liable for the 13th month an employee has accrued during their employment. Regardless of whether an employee still work for you at the end of the year or not, you still need to pay their accrued 13th month.

The important word their is accrued. You should pay them 1/12 of their basic salary for that period. If you use the base pay or gross pay formulas mentioned above, these will still work with no change required.

How to payout 13th month
The last thing I have to say on 13th month is about how you pay it out. So many companies pay it out separately to the their usual payroll cycle. This is totally acceptable but an unnecessary complication.

The only thing DOLE says about paying it out is the deadline on which it is received. I’d thoroughly recommend paying it out as part of your usual payroll cycle. Doing otherwise will usually lead to more resources being spent on payroll than necessary, and more bank charges for transferring the payment. If you think about the amount of time and effort that goes into one pay cycle, by removing the off-cycle element of 13th month you will free up your team to focus on more important items.

In Closing
Thirteenth month doesn’t need to be complicated. Use a simple formula, use a reporting period that is based on facts, and pay it out on time as part of your normal payroll. If you do this, you’ll remove a lot of the headaches and stress from your payroll process, and save a ton of work around the year end.

New: Per Shift Overtime

per-shift-overtimeWe have rolled out a new feature that will come in very handy for our BPO (Business Process Outsourcing) clients – per shift overtime.

Our overtime system will automatically calculate the amount of hours OT an employee has rendered based on your company overtime rules. Your employees can just clock in and out via one of your clocking devices and when it comes time to generate payroll overtime, ND etc. are all calculated automatically.

However, many of our BPO clients operate 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. They have multiple agents serving clients that are in multiple timezones. We decided that their unique setup required a unique overtime rule.

Today, we rolled out support for per shift overtime as part of our larger automated overtime calculation tool.

This means for employees that work a shift that runs past midnight and start their next shift that same day can be paid for any overtime occurred based on the shift hours, not the total hours within the calendar day.

For example:

Here is how you can see the difference between per shift overtime and per day overtime, both of which are possible in PayrollHero’s Philippine payroll platform.

per shift overtime for bpo

If you are interested in this feature, reach out to our client success team to learn more.

PayrollHero’s purpose built BPO payroll platform is perfect for your operation. We have quite a few specific tools just for the BPO industry. Here are a few more examples of how PayrollHero can help BPOs;

  • Employees who follow another countries holidays instead of Philippine holidays
  • Employees who have shifts overnight and how night time differential effects it
  • Employees who have shifts overnight and one of the days is a holiday

If you are not a PayrollHero client and want to learn more… you can see our offerings here:

Philippines | Singapore | Canada | USA | International

Is Your HR Team Prepared for 2017?

If you are planning on making changes to your HR and payroll tools then now is the time. Many companies still use Excel, paper and pen, or outdated software to complete their payroll each and every period.

Starting the calendar year fresh on a new platform that helps to automate your monthly reports, year end compliance and provides easy to use analytics is the way to go.

Here is how PayrollHero can help your business for 2017;

Singapore Companies ??

Philippine Companies ??

PayrollHero’s powered time, attendance, scheduling, HRIS, leave management and payroll platform is essential for todays growing business. Contact us to learn more.

2017

29 Ways To Grow Your Business in the Philippines

growing-business-payrollhero

This February 2016, we all get 1 extra day thanks to this being a Leap year. And since we’re getting one extra day, it’s high time that we all use it to grow our business and make it count.

Because we want you to make the most out of your year, we decided to push out 29 Ways to Grow Your Business in the Philippines.

Yes – 29!

This is quite a long read, but if you can just use some of these tips, you’ll have a great chance to make a tremendous ‘leap’ this year.

Okay, enough with the puns and let’s get started!

29 Growth Tips for your Business

#1 Take Social Media Seriously

Having a dormant Facebook account for your business, and an egg account on Twitter won’t cut it.

2016 is the year where Social Media is evolving at such a rapid state that if you still aren’t taking it seriously, you will be very much left behind.

We’ve written about how you can leverage social media to grow your business this 2016 to help you get started.

If you’re running a restaurant or retail store, now’s the best time to establish a presence on Social Media. The best platforms to use for restaurants and retail businesses is Facebook and Instagram.

Set up your accounts if you haven’t already, and check out our blog post to help you get your social media presence in the Philippines’ space up high.

#2 Embrace Technology

technology-payrollhero

Tech can be intimidating, especially for non-millennials. But it can’t be denied just how much technology makes everything easier for your business.

READ: Embrace Technology, Grow Your Business

Imagine going from manually sending emails one by one to automating everything using tools like MailChimp. Or sharing worksheets easily with teammates using Google Sheets rather than using Excel – saving the doc – sending an email to your colleague – editing the doc – sending back to you. 

There are so many ways for you to get ahead and embrace technology. We’ll be discussing them in more detail in other items.

#3 Leverage Customer Reviews

Whether you’re running a restaurant in the Philippines, a hotel, retail store, or a startup, one thing that you can’t ever have enough of is positive customer reviews.

For restaurants, Zomato is one of the biggest apps in the Philippines for food reviews. If you’re not on Zomato’s radar, you need to be on it ASAP.

More than that, you should consider giving incentives to your customers to write a positive review on Zomato. Ask them to share their experience on Zomato, so that when others view your restaurant in the app, they’ll be more enticed to dine at your restaurant.

For hotels, the same works with Agoda, TripAdvisor, and similar sites.

#4 Know Your Numbers

If you’re not the type of business owner who is a certified Math Wiz, then I’m sure you’ll agree that sometimes keeping everything organized ‘numbers-wise’ can be quite tricky.

But for your business to truly take off to the next level, you must know your numbers. Whether it is your internal stats like Google Analytics for your website, or your financial numbers (sales, costs, etc.) you have to be on top of it.

Here’s a quick guide to get you started.

#5 Better Inventory Management

sample-dashboard-of-tradegecko

Sample Dashboard of TradeGecko

A small business owner should keep close track of inventory in relation to seasonality because inventory costs can run up to exorbitant amounts despite the fact that it can be managed.

TradeGecko is an app that can help you with that. The cool thing about this app is that it gives you real time data on your phone. You can access your inventory data from anywhere in the world with a few clicks.

It’s highly important that you monitor your inventory because being prepared is always best for business. It might not seem like a powerful way to grow your business, but sometimes even the dirty work that you don’t love to do is key to get ahead.

#6 Cut Down on Meetings

Another quick growth hack for your business is to clearly evaluate the time spent on meetings. Here’s an excerpt from one of our earlier blog posts:

Meetings can often be directionless and unreasonably lengthy. You may find yourself spending an entire day running from one meeting to the next and ending the day having done nothing significant at all.

Whether the meetings are with your subordinates, potential clients or investors, it’s worth pressing the pause button, going through the goals for the meeting and deciding whether they warrant a meeting at all.

It’s important to cut these meetings down if most of the time is spent going back and forth on decisions that have already been made.

A good way to do this is to outline the goals of the meeting beforehand and go back to these goals at the end of the meetings and check if they have been met.

The more time you save on dodging or cutting down irrelevant meetings, the more time you have to actually do things that scale to grow your business.

Read here for more ‘time management hacks’ for business owners.

#6 Keep Your Employees Happy

PayrollHero Singapore Payroll Team

One of the biggest business secrets in the world is also the most obvious.

Happy Employees = Good for Business

That’s one simple equation that can literally make or break your business. Virgin’s CEO Richard Branson seems to agree.

And because we love you, we’ve made a quick guide to help you crack the formula in making your employees happy. Check it out!

#7 Learn from your Peers

The best way to scale your business is to learn from others who’ve done it. You can achieve this by reading articles from influencers in your space.

Medium is a really nice platform where you can find articles that is related to your industry.

If you want to get started right now, we’ve compiled a list of 16 Entrepreneur Interviews that can give you inspiration and further knowledge to grow your business.

#8 Build a Website for your Business (skip to #9 if you have one)

Did you know that even a completely fake business that has a nice looking website looks more legit than a REAL business that has no website.

Seriously — read this story on how a completely fake business that had no product / real service attracted ready-to-pay customers.

That’s how powerful having an online presence is nowadays. People are more likely to trust a business that has a website and active social media pages than a brand that has no online presence.

So if you’re one of those who still don’t have a website for your business, it’s about time you get one built.

You can head over to Upwork or find a local freelancer if you want to outsource everything. You can find really talented people who are willing to work at an affordable rate.

Go get your website done now!

#9 Build an E-Mail List

Now that you have a website, it’s time to use it to generate more SALES for your business.

Have you checked your email inbox lately and saw tons of emails from Zalora or Lazada, or some restaurants you like? You’re getting their newsletter and promotional emails because at some point in time, you signed up to their email list.

Believe it or not, these businesses are generating a lot of revenue via email marketing — and the best part is that you too can join in on the fun!

You don’t need technical skills to have it set up on your website. Just signup with SumoMe, a free suite of tools that can help you get more emails. It’s 100% free to use, but for more power, you can always upgrade to their PRO version.

With SumoMe, you can start building email up your email lists. You can set up a Welcome Mat just like one of the few that we use in one of our PayrollHero websites.

Here’s a sample:

sumome-tools-by-payrollhero

There are more variations that you can use to collect more emails using SumoMe. Once you’ve built up a list, you can then send strategic emails to market your product and drive more sales.

#10 Start A/B Testing

Okay… now this is a term that isn’t usually thrown around in brick and mortar businesses. It’s much more common in the tech space, but that doesn’t mean you can’t A/B test in your business.

Before we go deeper, here’s a quick snippet on what A/B Testing means.

ab-testing-payrollhero

Yeah, it says ‘web page’. But A/B testing can be done in literally anything you can imagine.

You can A/B test your restaurant menu, your window display, your Customer Support replies on Twitter; the list goes on!

The objective of doing an A/B testing is to make a data driven decision to grow your business. Whether it’s to generate more sales, or to improve how you treat your customers, the main objective is to get the best possible iteration and stick with it.

If you’ve been using the same menu in your restaurant for years, you can start mixing it up and put out new menus. Just distribute a few pieces and observe how your customers react to it. You can conduct a survey on what they think of your new menu to give you more context.

Obviously, the more data you can get, the better. But you can start testing out small things, and eventually you’ll be able to appreciate what it can do to boost your business.

#11 Use Slack

Slack-logo

Here @ PayrollHero, we use a ton of tools at work. Aside from email, one of our main communication tools is Slack.

If you haven’t heard of it, check out their website to learn more. But basically, Slack is a communication platform where you and your team can start conversations, share files easily, and host meetings. The true power of Slack though is through it’s various integrations.

You can have a bunch of tools integrated with Slack to help streamline many of your day to day business processes. Here’s a short article on how we use Slack at work to give you a better idea.

If you’re thinking that Slack may not be a fit for your business, then let me tell you that I’ve personally seen a local barbershop using Slack. I was surprised at first, then I realized that it’s just a really powerful tool that allows businesses that operate in multiple work locations to be able to communicate and work together.

Try it out and improve your team’s productivity!

#12 Run Social Media Contests

Remember Tip #1? If you’ve invested enough time building your brand pages and community on Social Media, you can start giving back to your fans.

Who doesn’t want a freebie? Everyone does, and social media platforms are the perfect venues to hold a contest. If you’re kinda on the fence about social media contests, these statistics from Hubspot prove that contests are a huge boost to customer engagement and carving out a loyal following:

  • Contests can increase new audiences by 34 percent on average
  • A third of entrants don’t mind receiving email updates from participating brands
  • Running your contest on mobile increases the number of entrants by eight times
  • Sweepstakes (e.g. Instant Win apps) is the most effective way to hold a contest if your goal is to increase fan base (entrants can turn into subscribers) while photo contests work best if you wish to boost customer engagement.

By and large, a social media contest can provide you with these two game-changing benefits:

  • Whether you get 50 or 500 entries, contests will generate buzz and drive people to your restaurant’s social media page.
  • Once you have this people’s attention, you can collect valuable data (such as email addresses for future newsletters or mobile phone numbers for weekly special reminders) from the entries. Be careful not ask for too many details though.

Running social media contests for your business is a great way to boost your following, increase brand awareness, and attract more customers to your store. You should definitely try it!

READ: Here’s One Cebu Restaurant Who Is Nailing It On Social Media

#13 Organize / Attend Meetups

Meetup_Logo_2015

A quick way to attract more customers to your business is by networking.

Events such as conferences, industry meetups or seminars is a great avenue for you to meet other people and network.

By building relationships with likeminded individuals, you’ll be able to share experiences with each other and learn new strategies to growing a business. You can even take things a notch by collaborating with other business owners in launching cross-branding promos and the like.

A good way to get started is by downloading Meetup. It’s an app that helps you connect with groups / individuals in your space. You’ll be able to attend regular ‘meetups’ and meet new people in the process.

 #14 Give, Give, Give, for FREE

In the words of the very successful entrepreneur / marketer Gary Vaynerchuk, you have to ‘Jab, jab, jab, right hook’.

This means that as a business, you have to give, give, give, before you ask. Giving away something valuable for free can go a long way in building customer loyalty. You can’t expect customers to just buy from you all the time if you don’t provide them value.

For restaurants / hotels, this could mean giving out discount coupons, or better yet, giving away free accommodation or a romantic dinner for two. If you can build excitement and give back to your customers, you’ll definitely get some positive reviews online and the word will spread quickly.

And when people start talking about your business in a positive light, you’ll be attracting more and more customers.

So yes — don’t be afraid to give out something for free because you’ll reap the rewards later on.

NOTE: We’re practitioners of this concept, which is why we always do our best to create valuable content and tools that we give away to our valued readers for FREE.

You can check out our Restaurant Knowledge Kit here, and our Service Charge tool here. All yours for FREE!

#15 Exercise Regularly

Seriously.

A study shows that entrepreneurs who exercise regularly are more likely to be successful. So don’t take it for granted and start allocating 30 minutes up to an hour a day for exercise.

You can hit the gym, or take a 30 minute swim; whichever you prefer. The healthier you are, the better decisions you make at work.

#16 Use Snapchat

snapchat

Snapchat is one of the fastest rising social media apps of all time. It hasn’t reached Facebook’s level in the Philippines yet, but Snapchat is trending upwards quickly.

Snapchat users are primarily teens up to 26 years old. If your business is targeting this age range, then you should be making efforts to market your business on Snapchat.

In the Philippines, Snapchat isn’t widely used by brands yet, so you have a chance to be one of the top pioneers of Snapchat marketing in the Philippines. It’s definitely worth a try.

#17 Attract Top Employees

If you want to grow your business in the Philippines, then you definitely need a huge dose of talent to help you get there.

We made a blog post on how to attract top employees for your business. Be sure to check it out and apply some of the tips when you start hiring people.

Speaking of hiring… One of the best ways to do that right now is through Kalibrr.

Hiring top talents is made easy with Kalibrr. You can get started and post your first job for FREE.

Try it out and watch the applications come in.

#18 Ask your Employees for Advice.

Ha! Why would a manager do that? Isn’t it supposed to be the other way around?

Social psychologist and author of Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion Robert Cialdini offers one seemingly counterintuitive yet effective suggestion to making your employees like you: Ask them for advice. This could range from personal advice like book recommendations to professional advice such as asking their opinion about social media platforms that they deem are ideal for your digital marketing campaign.

By and large, this gives the impression that you, as a manager, value their opinions. Bonus points if you follow their advice and update them that you’ve done one of their suggestions!

#19 Business Cards – Give and Receive

It’s 2016 and yes, business cards are still a thing. Although there are now apps that can house business cards in the cloud, the act of giving and receiving physical business cardsare still appreciated by entrepreneurs / execs.

The idea of business cards stem from networking. Building relationships is still a very important part of growing a business. You can’t expect to take off and grow at a rapid scale without having built strong business relationships along the way.

Image from – http://www.cardfaves.com

Image from – http://www.cardfaves.com

Now… how exactly can this help you? First, you have to make sure that you have a healthy stock of them.

Next, make sure your employees have business cards too!

They have lives outside of work — they go out for drinks and meet people. Wouldn’t you want them to hand out a business card with YOUR LOGO and YOUR BUSINESS NAME to new people they meet? It could open up a door of possible opportunities for your business.

Isn’t that much better than just having yourself do the networking for you?

We’ve prepped up a nice little guide to help you make your business card stand out.

#20 Empower Your Employees

There’s no better brand ambassador for your business than your employees. Make sure that they are heard and empowered in your company.

Motivate them, understand them, and hear them out. Sometimes employees aren’t as engaged and focused because they don’t feel that you trust them or they’re not being given a chance to showcase their skills.

READ: 3 Reasons Why Employees Get Bored

The best you can do is to talk to them and motivate them. Ask them what you can do for them.

Once you know what’s on your employees’ mind, you can then help them reach their full potential. Sometimes, growing your business should start from within.

#21 More Days Off 

landing-stage-sea-holiday-vacation

This applies for both you and your employees.

Now, before the pitchforks start coming in, understand that in order for you to be at your best, you also need to unwind and relax a bit.

You can’t keep up the 24/7 grind and not burn out. The same goes for your employees.

So if you want to grow your business this year, you MUST take vacations.

You can even organize a company-wide retreat so you and your employees can bond, relax, and clear their minds. After that, you can expect a more vibrant and rejuvenated team that’s ready to work harder than ever!

VIDEO: PayrollHero Leave Management in Action

#22 Sponsor Events

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Depending on what industry you’re in, you might want to consider hopping into Events Marketing.

Here in the Philippines, there are more and more rave parties and events happening almost every day. There are beach parties, club parties, you name it.

If you’re a fashion brand in the Philippines, you should consider being one of the main sponsors for such events. This can give your brand huge exposure from potential customers. Not only that, you can also generate sales in these events because most event organizers will allow you to put up your own stall in the event venue.

You can easily recoup whatever amount you spent to get into the event just on on-the-ground sales alone. And after the event? You can expect more prospects checking out your page / website thanks to the exposure you got.

#23 Maintain a Record of Expenses

As mentioned in tip #4, you can’t grow your business if you don’t know your numbers. This is why it’s very important to maintain a record of your expenses.

All too often, we start the year enthusiastically, taking not of expenses and filing them meticulously to find ourselves a month later struggling to keep up with our expense records.

It is easier with some help. Apps like Expensify or Mint help you keep track of your accounts, expenses and income. If you are a small business owner, these apps are a good place to start.

Of course, as you grow bigger, you will have to move to accounting software that can keep up with the growth of your business.

#24 Join the Conversation on Twitter

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Twitter is a great platform to learn more about your customers. If you use it right, you can really take advantage of its powerful search tool.

You can join any conversation on your space and attract potential customers.

Imagine an angry customer of Restaurant X. The angry customer didn’t enjoy the super expensive burger he ate. Now, as a burger chain yourself, you can then hop right in and tweet the said angry customer — offer him a free burger if he visits your store on the same day.

Doing that not isn’t only good for publicity… You can also potentially earn a loyal customer for life!

That’s just one way of using Twitter for growing your business. We’ll go deeper into this in future blog posts.

#25 Use Chat Apps for Customer Support

It’s 2016, and by now you should be more accessible to your customers more than ever.

People naturally hate waiting, so a displeased customer isn’t too happy waiting for an answer to their concerns via email.

A good way to make your business more accessible to customers is by using Chat apps. You can either set up a Zopim chat box on your website, or use Facebook Messenger so that customers can chat with you in real-time.

If you don’t really have staff who can man the Chat account 24/7, you can use Twitter instead.

#26 Automate Your Internal Processes

If there’s anything at all that your company is still doing manually, it may be time to reevaluate your processes.

Thanks to technology, a lot of internal processes can now be streamlined and automated. So if there’s still something in your business that takes up too much manual labor, such as doing payroll, it’s best to outsource it or simply use a service to make your life easier.

payrollhero-cool-logoPayrollHero offers a complete end-to-end solution to your time, attendance, HR, and payroll processes. We help businesses grow by giving them back one of the most important assets they have.

#27 Trimming the Fat

No, I’m not urging you to lose weight…

What I mean is that you should start re-evaluating your company from top to bottom. This doesn’t mean you have to fire your employees left and right. What you should be doing is really taking time to look into the different challenges that your employees are facing.

Are some of them doing work that they’re not supposed to do? Should you be cutting down on a few tasks that can easily be outsourced? Is there someone who is unhappy in your organization? 

You have to wear the HR hat and clean things up because there might be something going on internally that is hindering your company from getting to the next level.

#28 Incorporate Great Graphics using Canva

For your business to stand out this year, you need to produce more visually appealing content.

Thanks to Canva For Negosyo, you don’t need elite photoshop skills or a Graphic Designer on your payroll to produce high quality and visually appealing images.

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Canva in action.

As you can see in the image above, there are lots of free templates to choose from. You can also upload your own image, and add your own caption with tons of fonts to choose from.

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Here’s me adding a caption to an image I uploaded. It’s simple and easy, you can do it in less than 5 minutes!

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And the best part is that all of that is 100% FREE. Canva does offer a paid business version if you want to take things up a notch, so do check out their website for more details.

 #29 Take Action

Reading through this blog post won’t get you anywhere unless you take action.

One bad habit of people is that we tend to consume too much content, but get lost in the shuffle at some point. We either don’t follow through and take action, or we simply forget it altogether.

Now for you to truly grow your business in the Philippines, you must learn how to act fast and take action. This doesn’t just apply to following the tips laid out in this article, but moreso in making business decisions.

You have to be decisive, smart, and ready to get your feet wet. The only thing that’s standing between you and success is not taking action.

So go out there and take that leap you need to help your business grow! 

Okay, that’s the last pun I promise!


Please tell us your thoughts on this! We’d love to hear from you.

Good luck with your business and may you make the most out of this 1 extra day of February 2016!

[GET] FREE Service Charge Tool to Automate Your Payment

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If you work in the restaurant or hotel industry, you’re most probably familiar with Service Charges.

Here’s what’s written on the Philippines Labor Code:

“Art. 96. Service Charges.—All service charges collected by hotels, restaurants and similar establishments shall be distributed at the rate of eighty five percent (85%) for all covered employees and fifteen percent (15%) for management. The share of the employees shall be equally distributed among them. In case the service charge is abolished, the share of the covered employees shall be considered integrated in their wage.”

We’ve also written about Service Charges in the Philippines in one of our Knowledge Base articles, which you can read if you want to learn more.

In layman’s term, this means that employees get 85% of the service charges, while management keeps 15%. Seems simple right?

Unfortunately, paying service charges to employees can still get a bit tricky. There’s still going to be a lot of manual computation involved, and quite frankly, you surely don’t have that much time in your hands. After all, you’ve got a business to run!

And if there’s one thing we love to do here at PayrollHero, it’s to save valuable time and make everything easier for our clients.

So today, client or not, you can have exclusive access to our basic Service Charge Tool. Awesome, right?

All you have to do is sign up here to get your Service Charges Tool for FREE.

P.S. We can’t keep this available forever, so we are only offering this for a short period of time. So don’t miss out and get it now!

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Of course, with PayrollHero everything in your payroll process can be completely automated, including Service Charges. So feel free to reach us at sales@payrollhero.com if you’re interested to learn more.

4 Tips on Financial Practices for Business Owners

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As a new business owner, it can be tough to figure out what you need to prioritize to generate revenue and profits. If you are a chef owning a restaurant for the first time, and with no business experience, this can be a lot harder.

Luckily, we have some tips for you to refer to when it comes to dealing with finances. So let’s dig in!

1. Product costing

This is essential because you cannot run a business in a sustainable manner without knowing what your products cost. You need a break down of what each product is made up of and how much it costs to get it from your suppliers. This includes material, labour and overheads.

With the information about costs, you need to find your breakeven point: where revenue covers all costs (Revenue – Costs = 0). This is the minimum revenue you need to run the business.

2. Maintain a record of expenses

This is a good practice that is easier said than done. All too often, we start the year enthusiastically, taking not of expenses and filing them meticulously to find ourselves a month later struggling to keep up with our expense records.

It is easier with some help. Apps like Expensify or Mint help you keep track of your accounts, expenses and income. If you are a small business owner, these apps are a good place to start.

Of course, as you grow bigger, you will have to move to accounting software that can keep up with the growth of your business.

3. Understand your seasonal cashflows

This is imperative if you own a retail store or a restaurant. It ties back to points one and two. During the year, your sales will not be static. It will depend on factors like when people get their wages or special festivals and holidays. Sales could change on a monthly, or quarterly basis.

Most seasonal changes are calculated quarterly. This is important to monitor because you will have to manage inventory accordingly. It also helps in setting prices based on expected demand.

4. Inventory management

Like we mentioned in the previous point, seasonality affects inventory. A small business owner should keep close track of inventory in relation to seasonality because inventory costs can run up to exorbitant amounts despite the fact that it can be managed.

TradeGecko is an app that can help you with that. The cool thing about this app is that it gives you real time data on your phone. You can access your inventory data from anywhere in the world with a few clicks.

Whether you are in Singapore, the Philippines or anywhere in the world, these tips are important to know as a business owner. Keep in mind that delegating traditional business practices to apps is a great idea because it frees up time for you to focus on your core business.

Also, keeping up with technology doesn’t just make you efficient, it prepares you for the inevitable conversion to tech-based apps that all business will have to make at some point.